My dissertation, Writing and Ethics in The Southern Cone: Literature between the Singular and The Specific, reads a series of examples from the last dictatorship and the current post-dictatorship period in the Southern Cone--novels and essays from Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay (including works by Augusto Roa Bastos, Roberto Bolaño and Horacio Verbitsky), and a critical debate between artists and intellectuals in Chile (Nelly Richard and Willy Thayer). My goal is to expose their ways of conceiving how communities and individuals are structured by language that organizes subjects according to logics of belonging and rejection according to political values and practices. I take as my point of departure the work of philosopher Peter Hallward on individuation and the formation of groups and communities, from his book Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2002). I read my textual examples through the terms developed by Hallward, the Singular, the Specified, and the Specific. The Singular describes a way of imagining community identity as a self-creating and self-reinforcing unity where the only members are those who are innate to the singular concept that self-defines it. The Specified refers to a method by which subjects individuated themselves over and against a particular cause or people and thus define themselves by means of this difference. Lastly, the Specific describes a community that is radically indifferent to difference, arguing instead for a form of membership where any subject belongs. My dissertation shows how these three concepts are present in the historical and cultural ideas used by a contemporary generation of thinkers and artists to define the effects of the cultures of dictatorship and post-dictatorship in the Southern Cone. Understanding these concepts helps to elucidate how the cultural discourses during this period were structured and executed in relation to communitarian formation. In short, by reading my Southern Cone case studies through the optic of logics of individuation, I am able to produce a new way of seeing how the region’s intellectuals read the intersections of history, culture, politics, and community in the wake of Latin American dictatorships. / text

[pt] A presente tese propõe a análise da produção intelectual do cubano José Martí, com foco em seus estudos sobre a sociedade norte-americana do século XIX, observada durante o período de mais de uma década (1880-1895). As fontes que formam o cerne do objeto de investigação são o conjunto de crônicas publicadas em diferentes periódicos da América Hispânica, comumente chamados de Escenas Norteamericanas. A investigação da base filosófica que constituiu a visão de mundo do autor; sua interpretação acerca do significado da modernidade, a realização do exercício de perspectiva, propiciado pela experiência do exílio; o diálogo com as correntes históricas do pensamento social norte-americano, sobretudo o abolicionismo, o pensamento reformador, o debate da forma da vida religiosa em interação com a vida política, o anarquismo e o socialismo, nos permite valorizar a compreensão da história dos Estados Unidos por ele investigada, de um modo que destacou a importância da análise da vida espiritual para uma consideração correta da história e da cultura desta sociedade. Desse modo, a literatura, a filosofia, o pensamento social e político foram os elementos essenciais e indissociáveis de seu exercício de interpretação histórica. / [en] The present thesis proposes the analysis of the intellectual production of the Cuban Jose Marti, focusing on his studies on the American society of the 19th century, observed during the period of more than a decade (1880-1895). The sources that form the core of the object of investigation are the set of chronicles published in different periodicals of Hispanic America, commonly called Escenas Norteamericanas. The investigation of the philosophical basis that constituted the world view of the author; his interpretation of the meaning of modernity, the realization of the exercise of perspective, propitiated by the experience of exile; the dialogue with the historical currents of American social thought, especially abolitionism, reformist thought, the debate of the form of religious life in interaction with political life, anarchism and socialism, allows us to value the understanding of the history of the United States by him investigated, in a way that emphasized the importance of the analysis of spiritual life for a correct consideration of the history and culture of this society. In this way, literature, philosophy, social and political thought were the essential and inseparable elements of his exercise of historical interpretation.